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New Poems

Cynthia Hogue

Cynthia Hogue has published thirteen books, including eight collections of poetry, most recently, The Incognito Body (2006), Or Consequence (2010), the co-authored When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina (interview-poems with photographs by Rebecca Ross), published in 2010 in the University of New Orleans Press' Engaged Writers Series, and Revenance, listed as one of the 2014 "Standout" books by the Academy of American Poets.

Since 2006, Hogue has been an active translator from contemporary French poetry whose translations have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Aufgabe, Interim, Poetry International, APR and Field, among other journals. Her co-authored, book-length translation, Fortino Sámano (The overflowing of the poem), from the French of Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc Nancy, was published by Omnidawn in 2012 and won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2013. Also known for her criticism, she has published many essays on poetry, ranging from that of Emily Dickinson to Kathleen Fraser and Harryette Mullen. Her critical work includes the co-edited editions We Who Love To Be Astonished: Experimental Feminist Poetics and Performance Art (University of Alabama Press, 2001); Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (University of Iowa Press, 2006); and the first edition of H.D.?s The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton (University Press of Florida, 2007).

Among Hogue?s honors are an NEA Fellowship in poetry, the H.D. Fellowship at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, a MacDowell Colony residency, and the Witter Bynner Translation Fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Hogue served as the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University in the spring of 2014. She was a 2015 NEA Fellow in Translation, and holds the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.

Los Angeles Independent Publishing

New Poems

Red Hen Press, a Los Angeles independent publisher founded by Kate Gale, is the place for new poems, new fiction, and lesbian fiction/lesbian books.

Books Available:

Incognito Body

Physical and emotional pain, internal scarring, and explorations of social illness color the poems of this collection with hauntingly honest accounts, simultaneously filling readers with both a sense of hope and of surrender.

In June the Labyrinth

In June the Labyrinth is a book-length serial poem that is part pilgrimage, part elegy, in which the main character, Elle, embarks on a quest of sorts, investigating not only the "labyrinth" as myth and symbol, but the "labyrinth of the broken heart."

In June the Labyrinth, Cynthia Hogue's ninth collection of poems, is a book-length serial poem in four untitled sections, which together tell a mythic story that is part pilgrimage, part elegy. Its central trope is the figure of the labyrinth, which predates Christianity but also, strikingly, survived Christianity to be incorporated as a symbol of life into some of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. Hogue began visiting one of those cathedrals, Chartres, the summer her mother would die. She visited one afternoon when the great labyrinth of Chartres was uncovered and found herself walking it, after which she (lapsed Lutheran, failed Buddhist) lit a candle to the Black Madonna. The character of the dying woman at the heart of Labyrinth, Elle, is thus rooted in Hogue's personal experience of loss, but as the losses multiplied over years, Elle became a composite resembling no one person but only herself. The series plays a good deal with shifting pronouns, but largely, the "I" locates this work, as it must be, in the personal lyric of love and loss.

The book as a whole travels a trans-historical and trans-geographical terrain, on a quest of sorts, investigating not only the "labyrinth" as myth and symbol, but something akin to the "labyrinth of the broken heart." Surprisingly, the narrator discovers that at the heart of Elle's individual story is the earnest female pilgrim's journey, full of disappointment but also hard-won wisdom and courage, although the poems do not put it this way so directly. Rather, they distill, fracture, recompose, tell partially - literally in parts but also in loving detail - the story of a life.

Praise for In June the Labyrinth:

"What is happening when a book following (in every sense) a mother's death takes the form of a postmodernist stream of consciousness, giving full weight to space and silence, to the roots and routes of language, and to the predicament of the body? The poet's mind, as it were, breaking and entering? Today I could say I read In June the Labyrinth, or I could say I let the poem carry me downstream. The ghost of Shelley waved from the bank of the river. The world was being shattered but I was safe, thanks to Cynthia Hogue's well-made craft, in which I rode."

-- Alicia Ostriker

"Hogue has a knack for intensity. And she ingeniously describes natural processes in apt human terms - for instance, "the concentration it takes / for water to become / ice." ... Hogue's particular wit and intensity relay not merely the appearance of art, but the experience of it, 'its complication of what is.'"

-- Craig Morgan Teicher, New York Times Sunday Book Review

"Reading Cynthia Hogue's gorgeous new book is a little like being in a labyrinth: you know where you're going, but the turns keep surprising you and taking you places you didn't expect. This wonderful long poem - unbroken, again like a labyrinth - is heartbreaking, but the aesthetic richness and emotional depth make it a great gift."

-- Martha Collins

Revenance

By turns elegiac, ecopoetic, and impolitic, Cynthia Hogue's eighth collection, Revenance, is a condensery of empathic encounters with others and otherness. Hogue coins a word—from revenant, French for ghost—to consider questions of life and afterlife, and to characterize the ways in which the people and places we love return to us, and return us to ourselves, holding us to account. The poems of Revenance contain telling touchstone figures, like a guide named Blake who, noting signs of global warming, will speak of spirits but not angels; a man who dies and is brought back to life by the imaginative power of love; and a woman who can speak the language of endangered trees. While writing these poems, Hogue journeyed often across country to her familial roots in upstate New York in order to help care for her dying father. At last she began to record some of the many stories she heard of mysterious encounters and visitations, such as she herself was soon to witness, over several intensive years. Although grief silvers the threads of these poems, Hogue pares away the personal in order to be present to others in a fiercely engaged and innovative poetry.

Praise for Revenance

"The pitch of language can isolate image almost against memory, but as an instrument of its music. This is done across Hogue's new collection, Revenance, with an almost abstract, muralistic importance. I do love these poems—here is the balance of both color and flower naming the rose."

—Norman Dubie

"In her splendid eighth collection of poems, Cynthia Hogue looks deep and listens hard, finding the 'In / Visible' in the visible, straining to hear 'something, and more.' Whether she's inhabiting landscape or exploring art, Hogue seeks what eludes us, whether in depth or evanescence. Absence looms, in our impoverished and polluted earth, in the scraps of a lost interview, in the foreshadowed elegies that close the book; but the poet's deft use of language and form allow both what is and what is no more to be 'bodied forth, returning like a revenant: not whole, but changed.'"

—Martha Collins

Or Consequence

The poems in Cynthia Hogue's collection, Or Consequence, range from meditations on "freedom" to poems crossing cultural and formal boundaries. The first and third sections introduce a series of informal etudes, which contemplate timeless aspects of human experience (love, power, memory, trust, war and peace). Such subjects are brought to bear on language as excavation and reclamation in Hogue's central section, a discrete series entitled "Under Erasure/ Ars Cora," after the last slave, Cora Arsene, to use the courts to sue for freedom on the eve of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. In the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Hogue's poem cycle meditates on traces: traces of a lost life, of a presence that has been erased, part of the palimpsest that is post-Katrina New Orleans (a city in which Hogue once lived). In the case of Cora Arsene, Hogue finds such a trace lying unnoticed, forgotten, but sign of a dynamic, courageous presence that persists. These poems invoke this presence in classic lyric strategy, but not to reembody the lost but to follow the trace's thread from the real to the sublime. Hogue's is an innovative poetics of inquiry, an analytic lyric striking a balance between method and music, collage and image, and finally, between violence and that other ancient human capacity, love.

Los Angeles Independent Publishing

New Poems

Red Hen Press, a Los Angeles independent publisher founded by Kate Gale, is the place for new poems, new fiction, and lesbian fiction/lesbian books.